Maxwell Dissertation

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts AGONISTIC DISCOURSES: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERARY THEORY AND COMPOSITION IN THE CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITY A Dissertation in English by Jason C. Maxwell © Jason C. Maxwell 2014 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 The dissertation of Jason C. Maxwell was reviewed and approved* by the following: Jeffrey Nealon Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Debra Hawhee Professor of English Richard Doyle Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Claire Colebrook Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English Jonathan Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Garrett Sullivan Professor of English Director of Graduate Studies of Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT Agonistic Discourses: Exploring the Relationship Between Literary Theory and Composition in the Contemporary University contributes to an ongoing effort to historicize Rhetoric and Composition as an academic discourse. From the groundbreaking work of James Berlin and Robert J. Connors to the more recent investigations of Jessica Enoch, David Gold, and Donna Strickland, scholars of Rhetoric and Composition have long been interested in English as a discipline and the status of composition studies within it. Building on this important work, my project reassesses the enormous growth of Rhetoric and Composition over the last several decades by pairing it with another subfield within English that developed at roughly the same time—literary theory. While the parallel evolution of literary theory might initially seem unrelated to Rhetoric and Composition—a reasonable assumption given their often antagonistic relationship—these discourses prove to be strikingly complementary if we understand them as symptomatic of broad changes in American political and economic life. More specifically, transformations in capitalist production over the last thirty years have placed workers and even entire industries in a state of perpetual fluctuation. Both Rhetoric and Composition and literary theory seem particularly well suited for preparing students to thrive in this new environment since they reject an enculturation model of education. Elaborating upon the connections between Rhetoric and Composition and literary theory has significant implications for thinking about English Studies’ place in the contemporary university insofar as it provides a way of conceptualizing a practically oriented pedagogy that avoids becoming narrowly instrumental. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..v Introduction: PROFESSING NO LONGER?.....................................................................1 Chapter 1: ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF RHETORIC IN COMPOSITION AND THEORY………………………………………………………………………………..15 Chapter 2: BETWEEN STANDARDIZATION AND SERIALIZATION: KENNETH BURKE, FREDRIC JAMESON, AND RADICAL CRITICISM IN THE POST- FORDIST ERA ………………………...………………………………………......…....69 Chapter 3: MAPPING THE ARCHIVAL TURN IN ENGLISH STUDIES…….……..109 Chapter 4: TOWARD AN AESTHETICS WITHOUT LITERATURE………...….….162 Chapter 5: TEACHING THE CRISIS: THE WIRE, BUSINESS WRITING, AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF LITERATURE.…………….…………………….…191 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………...…………………….218 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Although this dissertation has only one author, it would not have been possible without the contributions, both large and small, from a great number of people. For starters, I couldn’t have asked for a better committee. First and foremost, Jeff Nealon played an enormous role in shaping my thinking during my six years at Penn State. Without his unflagging commitment and support, this project would not have come to fruition. Debra Hawhee reliably offered a perspective that pushed my work in new directions. Rich Doyle was a boundless source of optimism who provided valuable insights at crucial moments. Claire Colebrook advanced some crucial questions about my project in the late stages of writing that made this a much better project. I also wish to thank Michael J. Hogan, Debra Hawhee, and Cheryl Glenn for selecting me as a fellow for the Center for Democratic Deliberation during the 2012-2013 academic year; I gained a lot of valuable feedback from the Center’s writing group, including Professor Glenn, Sarah Rudewalker, Jessica Kuperavage, and Fabrice Picon. My project also benefitted from a summer research fellowship in 2013 thanks to Sean Goudie and the Center for American Literary Studies. I also appreciate receiving a Edwin Earle Sparks Fellowship during the Spring 2014 semester, which allowed me to hole up in my home during a cold winter and complete my dissertation—thanks to Director of Graduate Studies Garrett Sullivan for thinking of me. I was also fortunate to have a wonderful assemblage of friends who supported me during the writing process. Thanks go to Ting Chang, Nate Redman, Erica Stevens, Michelle Huang, Ryan Marks, Kris Lotier, Sara and Josh Dicaglio, Robert Birdwell, John Schneider, Jacob Hughes, Ethan Mannon, Kyle King, Josh Smith, and Josh Tendler for their support over the years. Evan McGarvey—you made the dissertation! Sarah Salter was an endlessly committed vi reader of my work whom I feel lucky to have shared so many important professional trials and milestones over the last three years. Roommates Abe Foley and Matt Weber humored me when I decided to flesh out an idea late at night. And Susan Weeber kept me sane through it all. 1 Introduction: Professing No Longer? My title, Professing No Longer, should, I hope, bring to mind Gerald Graff’s landmark 1987 disciplinary history Professing Literature. In that work, Graff traces the various schools and movements that have made up the discipline of English, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century and working his way up to the beginnings of the “theory wars” in the early 1980s. While considered by most as an indispensable account of English studies in the American university, Professing Literature, now almost thirty years old, can no longer claim the same contemporaneity it did upon initial publication. The discipline has evolved in a number of ways that warrant updating and amending Graff’s important work. At some level, this would appear like a relatively straightforward task insofar as one could pick up where Graff left off and document the rise of New Historicism, the debates surrounding the literary canon in the late 1980s and the ensuing culture wars, and the emergence of the various “studies” in the last two decades or so that concern the body, affect, animals, disability, and other topics. One could analyze how these developments either conform to or complicate the broad arguments that structure Graff’s book. My dissertation adopts a different approach in that it starts with our contemporary moment and works backward to the point when the most distinctive features of today first began to emerge. I understand this to be a fundamentally Foucauldian approach to history. Indeed, in the final moments of the introduction to Discipline and Punish, Foucault calls his analysis a “history of the present.” Rather than an account primarily concerned with accurately recreating a specific moment in time in exhaustive detail, Foucault’s “effective history”—a term he coins in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”—begins in the present and only looks to the past in 2 order to diagnose the forces that constitute this present. In that respect, my project actually begins with a period before Graff’s book ends to look at the emergence of two distinct but related discourses that I think are essential to understanding English studies today: literary theory on the one hand and Rhetoric and Composition studies on the other. While these discourses receive varying degrees of treatment in Professing Literature, their current statuses within English studies are quite surprising from the vantage point of the mid-1980s when Graff completed his book. A simple glance at any recent Job Information List of the Modern Language Association, where positions in Rhetoric and Composition far outnumber any other area group, should be enough to suggest tracing the emergence of this field (in what follows, I sometimes use the term “composition studies” as another name for this subdiscipline). In the second page of Professing Literature, Graff acknowledges that his account “deal[s] only in passing with the teaching of composition” even though “without that enterprise the teaching of literature could never have achieved its central status” (2). My own work is not so much concerned with the specific practice of teaching first-year writing in the university—that’s been going on for quite some time—as it is with the emergence of a research agenda around this teaching practice, particularly one that distinguishes itself from the rest of the department. The emergence of this research agenda is striking considering how teachers of composition have tended to adhere to the “pedagogical imperative” and, à la Joseph Harris, embraced composition as “a teaching subject.” Much of Rhetoric and Composition’s identity comes from championing, unlike its counterparts in literary studies, teaching over research. At the same time, the publish-or-perish model has only intensified since Graff’s Professing Literature, and composition’s desire to be taken seriously as a discourse, an equal among its peers in the department, necessitates

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